State Gives $13 Million For Center For Families

Gov. George Ryan, recalling his 1998 campaign promise to make education one of his top priorities, announced Friday the awarding of a $13.4 million state grant to build a family development center.

The center is to be built on the campus of Governors State University in University Park and be operated jointly by the university and Crete-Monee School District 201. It will provide preschool for some 33 children up to 5 years old and a charter school for 125 in kindergarten through 4th grade.

The facility also is to provide a range of pupil and parent services, including after-school child care and parenting education to families of children enrolled in the center.

Ryan said that the center will be important in ensuring that children in eastern Will County are prepared to meet life's challenges.

"Children face a lot of tougher challenges today than at any time in the past," Ryan said. "From kindergarten through college, they are being bombarded with forces that don't have their best interests at heart. It is up to us, therefore, to give them the services and support they need to meet those challenges, and it is my job as a public official to provide the funding."

Ryan flew from Springfield Friday morning to make the announcement of the grant and to tour Governors State child development center's current home, in District 201'smiddle school in Crete.

Ryan noted that the new center will be different from other such facilities by providing educational stimulation to children during the most crucial period, academically, in their lives: from infancy roughly through the 3rd grade, when they begin to learn how to read.

"It's a known fact that if kids don't have the foundation for reading established by the 3rd grade, they are going to have a tough go of it academically in later years," Ryan said.

Construction of the Family Development Center at Governors State is expected to begin in May, according to Paula Wolff, the university's outgoing president.